Mate should be the solution, alas, it's not in portage yet (and I don't want to deal with overlays just yet). Also it seems some of these masks people have been generating are dependent on overlays so I'm not quite sure if there are some dependencies there.

I generated my own list with the 3.8 hack as a base. Now I'm sort of stuck with just libsoup and libgdata being blocked.

Ugh... dependency nightmare! Plus I have multiple machines that I need to repeat the same exercise with... ugh. Or they should be upgraded to systemd+gnome3.8 ..._________________Intel Core i7 2700K@ 4.1GHz/HD3000 graphics/8GB DDR3/180GB SSDWhat am I supposed to be advocating?

Here's my portage.mask
I don't have gtk+ in mine, but it works for me.
No more udev mask as i have switch to eudev
edit: remove/adapt toolchain mask for your own usage.
edit: i'm not sure if my portage.mask is good for that thread, mine is masking gnome3, and not just 3.8

I am also attempting to mask off gnome 3 but must have missed something and now the system->shutdown menu is missing and pressing the power button on the laptop does nothing -- I think it used to be the same as system->shutdown. Is there any way to get this back ?

I'm not too concerned about adding more packages to the mask, but now it's saying that @selected and @world overlays require the masked packages. Does this mean that the default/linux/x86/13.0/desktop/gnome profile itself is demanding that I move to 3.8? If so, this may be goodbye for Gentoo.

I run a straight desktop profile, and have some gnome applications. You should be able to "pop up" a level on the profile to desktop without the gnome, and mask your way out of this. But desktop/gnome will require 3.8 and will require systemd, even though they've got desktop/gnome as well as desktop/gnome/systemd - the former really doesn't work, any more._________________.sigs waste space and bandwidth

I'm simply amazed at the number of threads that keep popping up where some people think that
one can update gdm or a component of gnome or go to systemd without pulling in practically all of the latest gnome.

For some packages it's possible, but does typically require lots of masking to get rid of blocks.

It's not really clear to many that one either goes whole hog or not at all in the gnome world.
It's similar in many respects to when Kde went to 3 and then 4, of course they didn't have the added brouhaha of systemd._________________Asus m5a99fx, FX 8320 - amd64-multilib, 3.15.9-zen, glibc-2.19, gcc-4.9.2, eudev
xorg-server-1.16, openbox w/lxpanel, nouveau, oss4(2011)

I had a reply wrote up for this earlier and killed it. Playing devil's advocate that I was being too harsh and not neutral enough to the overall situation here (and more importantly, elsewhere). So, let's try this again.

@tatterdemalian,

depontius essentially re-iterated what I was going to initially say. On a more detailed level, look at the profile make.defaults and package.use files within
/usr/portage/profiles/targets/desktopand/usr/portage/profiles/targets/desktop/gnome

That may add a bit more clarity. You don't need either of those settings to have a gnome2/3 desktop and, yes, the later is currently set with additionally new gnome3 specific requirements. And, yes, they changed a 'testing' version to being keyworded stable while retaining slot conflicts with Gnome2. The point, essentially, was definitely to force most users to upgrade on updating. The rest are ignored and told they are unsupported (whatever that really means). Keep in mind the mindset with bug reports on anything Gnome2 specific essentially fell into perpetual wontfix/ignored due to Gnome2 already being viewed as depreciated via upstream's mindset. The triage effort into Gnome2 in the last 2-3 years seemed weak at best with most effort from that subset of devs being on Gnome3. But since I do not see any of those particular devs involved in the actual codebase with freedesktop.org, my expectations of patch fixes versus regressions and so on were more or less null and void. What remained more disconcerting was this essentially wind up toy event coming over time in non-existant communications between gnome herd devs and the userbase. But first, as a testbed, let's see how excited the ants scurry about with (udev)systemd!

Also keep in mind that systemd 'conveniently' became a requirement due to a logind requirement added within Gnome 3.8. From a patch on upstream mailing list showing this change it looks like it could be removed, but it's probably just more intertwined in 3.10+. Naturally because of this, power management was also tied into systemd in a 'may as well' fashion. The developers responsible for all of that have some 'interesting' here's-what-we-think-of-our-users-and-3rd-party-developers comments in the link I give later.

In all fairness, none of this really has much to do with the Gentoo developers in the grand scheme of things. Other than decisions of how they opted to, if at all, fight with following upstream entirely while trying to maintain the abandoned Gnome2 set, or just go with the flow. If I were to put my dev hat on versus a fretting user that I didn't wish to placate, there's the simple argument that we've had at least 3 years to 'prepare and reflect'. There also seems to be somewhat of a pervasive hivemind to 'encourage' moving to systemd adoption as the default. Most distros have been either getting their collective asses kicked around with this or just trying to go the path of least resistance (which in this case, still involved plenty of work). You can leave Gentoo and be no less worse for wear because these radical changes imposed won't just go away, industry wide. The closest things would be a long term security patch support binary distro with either strong remaining Gnome2 or the MATE(gtk2)/Cinnamon(gtk3) forks. Or stepping back to 19eightyfrickingfive when this functionality already existed for a desktop, use KDE (which still seems confused on direction), or roll your own limited mix of windowmanager Bob+flavorings+CLI. If gtk2 was adopted/maintained by XFCE/MATE developers with a healthy 3rd party developer base supporting them fully and monetary backing (hi Google) to actually compete with RedHat's resources, I wouldn't be quite as concerned. But none of that is the case. So you have a developer base who has been fractioned off since old Motif days into QT vs GTK camps around these two desktops and their always changing ideals. Because of that and that alone, some quality software with years of serious development effort get held hostage. And I guarantee it's going to get worse.

The best thing that could have happened is the claimed merit based adoption. That the folks monetized via redhat renamed their new entity for a desktop, forking away from Gnome2 or (as they've done anyway) a complete re-write from scratch. They'll create their own widget toolkit and frameworks to use instead of forcing longstanding ones to be depreciated by them. They'll produce a stablized and quality API design that everyone can confidently understand with no concerns about stable releases underlying smartly changing implementation details. Which in turn, 3rd party developers will greatly appreciate and get behind with their own efforts leveraging said API while not expecting such to break every other month. In fact, they're excited, since this new API and way is the best thing to Linux since prior sliced bread days. They're such heroes to the community that they will provide flawless sophisticated conversion utilities to automatically migrate GTK and QT calls in 3rd party code to their new API. And, they'll foolhardily take on changing the entire init system even more 'progressively' into a closed and monolithic system than Canonical that anything and everything will be forced to ultimately depend upon because it's for the best. It'll be presented in Fedora as the wonder upon wonders and immediately merged into the Enterprise. But it'll be so great and they'll prove everyone else who came before them for decades and in the decades to come that their new setup is the best, the way and the light... And then we'll all switch, due to the quality unbiased books, multitude of new related professional certifications, knowledge base, serious technical articles in professional journals fawning over the godlike design decisions and proven undestructable yet so productively user friendly systems worldwide showing just how right they were! The bazaar will finally have come home to the cathedral. Righto...

I've been dreading this change since reading about it initially back at 3.0. I had hopes at least some of the backlash they'd receive from radically changing and unstable API would get upstream to eventually see the light. But this is about money, product branding and industry control, treating newer users and existing 3rd party developers like sheep, not merit. Watched any of their videoed speeches regarding newer aspects, particularly security? I have. It's scary. Their desktop platform, widget toolkits, etc. aren't worth a damned thing without the 3rd party software leveraging it and its userbase they're manipulating. Yes I'm talking about Redmo...hat. For all their over-talk decisions and literal enforcement of all towards 'simplicity' and completely dumbed down on the front end of things (creating and maintaining that brand for their cloud oriented userbase), they're making the back end of systems the giant ugly monster hiding behind door number 3... Luddites? Conspiracy? Etc.? Nah, too simplistic. This is just plain and simple corporate agenda, but at least when Google is doing it they don't claim an apple is an orange.

The original developers have long lost control of gtk, gnome, etc. into the hands of the corporate collective and being morphed into completely different targets. Before I go off sounding any more cynical about the new kool-aid, here's a great link to sum much of the current attitudes upstream:

Is free software now just a market for devs working for very big tech enterprises and wanting to feel power and fame as if they were a big boss?

Quote:

And reading those dev comments, it’s so clear that most of their thought and energy is devoted to their marketing and ‘brand presence’, and so very little to making quality, innovative software. By some strange coincidence, that’s just what has been largely lacking in the field of Linux apps.

Can't say I'm terribly surprised over the whole thing.
There are many of us who have seen the handwriting on the wall,
and have had aspersions cast our way (luddite "not modern", conspiracists, etc)
when we tried to mention what we saw coming.
[ And no, I'm not really interested in renewing the back and forth, over it, just stating my view ]

I wish gnome well, same for kde, but I will never use either of them and for anyone asking my opinion, I would recommend against.
You might as well use windows, it's more mature than the johnny-come-latelys, ie. kde/gnome._________________Asus m5a99fx, FX 8320 - amd64-multilib, 3.15.9-zen, glibc-2.19, gcc-4.9.2, eudev
xorg-server-1.16, openbox w/lxpanel, nouveau, oss4(2011)

If you want to keep gnome-2* then I would suggest that you copy all the ebuilds into your local portage now.
That way you can still keep using it even if it gets removed (almost a certainty) from portage.

Yes, it would be a pain, and there would be no fixes, but if it's working now, then it will continue to work.

gives a list of some 470 packages with gnome in metadata file, not all would be needed, but it would be a place to start for creating a local tree._________________Asus m5a99fx, FX 8320 - amd64-multilib, 3.15.9-zen, glibc-2.19, gcc-4.9.2, eudev
xorg-server-1.16, openbox w/lxpanel, nouveau, oss4(2011)

Currently the ideal situation is that we can keep the ebuilds plus be able to upgrade unrelated stuff... this second part is tough with so many blocks with the proposed masks...

Yeah anything that depends on gtk-3* may need to be masked as it's a constantly changing minefield of compatibility.
I had 3 programs that depended on gtk-3 and downgraded them this morning and got rid of gtk-3 completely.
Still have a several gtk-2 programs, and that's fine.

Quote:

I've also noticed with the gnome masks, portage is a whole lot slower calculating... ouch...

Hadn't thought of that, but I'm not surprised.

As a side note, I left gnome (all of it) several years back
when v 2 came out as even then it was bloated compared to the previous versions.
I did go to xfce for a while, but finally left as it seemed like it was being infected with needing various gnome parts to work.
I've been happily using lxde for a while now.

I don't know (long term) what xfce is going to do, move everything to gtk-3 or try and stay where they are.
The lxde developers looked at what it would take to move to gtk-3 from gtk-2
and they decided to start looking at qt since it was basically a rewrite either way.
I've seen other people commenting that with even minor revs of gtk-3 breaking compatibility with previous versions.
(don't know how true that is as I'm not a gtk developer)
The problem is gtk is tightly linked with gnome.
And everyone should be able to see which way the wind is blowing there._________________Asus m5a99fx, FX 8320 - amd64-multilib, 3.15.9-zen, glibc-2.19, gcc-4.9.2, eudev
xorg-server-1.16, openbox w/lxpanel, nouveau, oss4(2011)

I deliberately did not state GNOME3 because I don't want to limit the bug to version 3. Perhaps the bug entry can be used to discuss the scope._________________Diplomacy is the art of letting the other party have things your way.
-- Daniele Vare

A removal of a ton of packages needs solid and sound reasoning to carry weight; as its removal would be announced to all developers, just like any other package removal. Without such reasoning, there are sufficient reasons to keep it in the Portage tree.

As a side note; please note that GNOME 2 and/or GNOME 3.6 will eventually be removed from the Portage tree thus the masks only work for a limited amount of time, I suggest that you look into MATE, Unity or an alternative solution instead to avoid wasting time.

I think my system has passed the point of no return. I tried to stay with GNOME 2.32 as long as possible. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to do a clean "emerge world" in some time. There's just too much pressure to move forward.

I tried several of the lists of masked packages in this thread, they were helpful. Unfortunately, I still get hit by strange dependencies that seem to be unresolvable, probably because the older version of the program I needed has already been deleted from the Gentoo Portage tree when doing "emerge sync". It's unfortunate that this is being done. I wish the developers would have continued to give us the choice of GNOME 2 or GNOME 3, perhaps with USE flags "gnome2" or "gnome3" to allow the choice to be made.

So, wish me luck. I'm going to remove my carefully curated package.keywords, package.mask, etc. files and just start over, taking the Gentoo defaults. Hopefully I will have a stable system again, even if it means having to accept the lobotomy that GNOME 3 gives to the desktop experience.

You might consider using "Mate" instead. Currently it's in an overlay, but I thought I heard that it may be getting in portage mainline. It's basically a fork to keep the gnome-2 interface._________________.sigs waste space and bandwidth

It's better than the alternative: reinstalling my system from scratch. I don't think it's saveable. I played around with various things in package.mask, package.keywords, and so on, and even after removing all these files, emerge can't find a solution to bring my system back to "standard".

I keep getting trapped in slot conflicts. libpng seems to be the worst offender, but there are many others. It wants to keep at least three versions of libpng on my system, sigh.